


and we're on fire

by diana_hawthorne (stsgirlie)



Category: Cracks (2009)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-05-04 13:44:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5336228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stsgirlie/pseuds/diana_hawthorne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She waits, and waits, and waits in vain, unable to be patient any longer as the years pass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and we're on fire

Fifteen hundred postcards, taking up a trunk of their own, all written from different places, all by different people – all to the same person.

Di writes them all, but with each new day she is different, she has to be. If she remains the same for any length of time she feels everything swamping her, overwhelming her, destroying her again. So she changes.

She has a different wardrobe for each mood, each person – even a different handwriting style and different way of speaking. Sometimes, at night when she’s drunk and lonely and desperate for any semblance of a past (or a future), she organises the postcards into the person she was when she wrote them.

There is no order to them. She is the same person in England and Egypt and India (and she does ride on the backs of elephants with rajahs, firmly pushing any memory of those lies behind her, stepping down on them), but not in South Africa or Ireland or Spain.

 

She stops by Rhodesia and meets Fuzzie’s parents at the Embassy, knowing full well who they are (there is Fuzzie in her mother’s red hair, her father’s chubby cheeks) though they do not know her. She stays with them for a few days and comes across their weekly letter to their daughter. She reads it, and the next day she leaves. A month later Fuzzie receives the letter, handed to her by Miss Nievan and not the glamorous, red-taloned woman who once supervised their activities.

‘Dear Persephone,’ she reads aloud, and Di, when she read the letter in Fuzzie’s parents’ house, could almost see the girl, ‘We had the pleasure of entertaining a young English girl on her way to South Africa, named Diane Radfield. She claims she went to school up north...’

Poppy snatches the letter from Fuzzie’s hand and then, two weeks later, steals it and puts it with Di’s last letter to the Team.

 

She sends shortbreads for Rosie from Harrods, and Poppy manages to beg and steal enough to take her to London, but she is gone from her hotel already (instinctively she knows she would stay at the Savoy, and she had –) but she is gone already and when she returns to school she is punished.

Rosie keeps the shortbreads under her bed, next to the empty tin that once held the treats from her parents. But Poppy, under the cover of darkness, switches out the tins with one she purchased from Harrods and then flees to the graves with her treasure, lying back on the cool granite as she used to and nibbling the cookies, acting, unbeknownst to her, just like the woman who had ruined everything for them.

 

Laurel is next, receiving dozens of books in foreign languages – Hindi, French, Italian, Russian (not Spanish, never Spanish), but not with a note. Even the writing on the package is unrecognisable – written by a clerk, perhaps, or a concierge at an exclusive hotel – and mailed all the way from Italy. There is no way for Poppy to add this library to her collection, though she recovers the wrapping-paper from the rubbish bin and smoothes it flat, pressing it between the books Di had left behind.

 

When Di travels to India she thinks of Lily – precocious Lily, Lily who they thought would become famous for sex. So she smiles as she discovers a beautifully and graphically illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra, and sends it to her, wrapped in a shawl to hide it from Miss Nievan’s all-seeing eyes. This time she writes a note warning her not to open it in the dining room. Lily pushes it aside, her mind on other things (boys, of course), and when she leaves it on their table, Poppy picks it up and unwraps it in private.

Looking through the pictures, she cannot help but imagine herself in those poses (has Di looked through them too? Has she imagined these things?) and then she does what she has not done in so long – remember St. Agnes’ Eve, and how she felt that night.

Di had imagined those things too, the drunken night she sends out the book and the shawl, but she cannot bring herself to send Poppy anything.

 

From Australia to Stanley Island comes the small, blue-enamelled pin emblazoned with the word ‘CAPTAIN’ in big, bold letters. There is a note attached, written in large, drunken script.

‘We don’t ask for forgiveness, but you should.’

The pin is held in red-taloned hands, then set neatly on the nightstand. It replaces the little carved elephant.

Five things on her nightstand, just five.

 

And then it is Poppy’s turn for a letter or a note or a present – something, at least. They had been best friends, they had loved each other... but then she cannot bring herself to actually send any of the postcards she wrote. Instead, she writes another, adding it to her collection. Her collection of postcards that will never, ever be sent.

 

She waits, and waits, and waits in vain, unable to be patient any longer as the years pass. She leaves the school and goes on her own travels, and goes to the places she knows Di visited.

But it is in London, so close to home, that she finds her again.


End file.
